Having found himself on thin ice, Harold “Trey” Gowdy is seeing cracks all around him. What’s worse, he’s completely lost his balance and, like the novice skater, keeps blundering about, unable to right himself.
And it’s all getting to him.
As Salon noted in their article aptly named Trey Gowdy’s hurt feelings: Benghazi fraudster flails as his farce flops:
...there’s one casualty of the Benghazi committee’s political reckoning that, until now, had gone unnoticed: chairman Trey Gowdy’s feelings.
In
an interview with Politico, Gowdy lamented:
I would say in some ways these have been among the worst weeks of my life.
This from a former prosecutor who received death threats in his last job?
Attacks on your character, attacks on your motives, are 1,000-times worse than anything you can do to anybody physically — at least it is for me.
My immediate reaction to this was: Gowdy now knows a fraction of what Clinton has had to endure from the sustained attacks on her character by his committee. The only difference being that HRC was attacked with falsified material while Harold Watson Gowdy Jr is failing to deal with the sudden appearance of truth.
But let’s return to Gowdy’s complaint for a second look. He’s actually asserting that attacks on his character are 1,000 times worse than physical violence. While there’s no doubt that verbal abuse can inflict real emotional pain, this is emphatically not what Gowdy is confronting. Most of his torments arise from self-inflicted wounds.
Meantime, I have to ask: what happened to the tough guy interrogator image he’s been at pains to foster? Gone with the wind apparently. He’s even appeared in public looking like he hasn’t shaved in 48 hours.
It isn’t pretty but, like everything Gowdy does, there’s the nagging feeling that it’s contrived, that he is exercising his prime tactic: manipulation. It would take 2-3 seconds to slide a comb through his hair and a quick shave takes as long as a cup of coffee needs to cool down to drinking temperature. This looks staged, in a pathetic and vain attempt to garner sympathy.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work for him. Instead of being wracked with stress, he gives the impression that his slovenly look was achieved either because he’s really hung over or he was just too lazy to bother that morning. Neither does him any credit. Like everything he’s done lately, it’s artificial and overdone. Unexpectedly from someone who talked himself up to dizzying heights, Gowdy’s crisis management strategy turns out to be overreaction followed by overreach and finished off with a prat fall.
It all began with Gowdy’s House Select Committee on Benghazi suffering exposure to the glare of truth when Majority Leader McCarthy boasted it had been set up to ruin Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That blow to credibility was further compounded by whistleblower Major Bradley Podliska. Gowdy described him as a disgruntled ex-employee “seemingly unaware”, as Huffington Post columnist Jason Linkins put it, “of the fact that Podliska's already copped to his own lack of gruntlement.”
Podliska’s revelations of disgraceful behavior on the part of the Republican committee members so angered Gowdy that he evidently forgot all his legal training. Consequently Podiska’s lawyer promptly sent Gowdy a cease-and-desist letter which charged him with violating government confidentiality rules and federal law.
At the same time, Democrats launched their own offensive. Louise Slaughter presented a bill to defund the select committee. Alan Grayson formerly lodged an ethics complaint against both McCarthy and Gowdy. Ranking member of the select committee, Elijah Cummings, exposed Gowdy’s practice of leaking statements out of context to Politico to frame Clinton.
Cummings also revealed that Gowdy cast aside his proposed schedule, failed to attend any hearing not directly concerning Clinton, slowed down all procedures to a “glacial pace” and ignored fairness and comity by excluding all Democratic committee members from several interviews with material witnesses.
A third Republican, Rep Richard Hanna, agreed with Kevin McCarthy’s gaffe (ie: truth-telling) and stated plainly that he too understood the select committee to be an instrument of HRC torment. Gowdy must have been incensed – and desperate. He looked about for something – anything – to divert all this unwelcome attention that was spotlighting the true purpose of his committee.
It had to be something that led the public’s focus back to the “untrustable” HRC. His gaze alighted on an email from Clinton friend and adviser, Sidney Blumenthal. It wasn’t particularly notable in its original form but, with a suggestive redaction here and there, it became a – gasp, horror! – security breach!
Far be it from me to suggest Gowdy is as sharp as a spoon but he didn’t reckon with Elijah Cummings and he really should have known better. Gowdy’s initial claim that the CIA had made the redactions did not fool Cummings, nor did his second story: that the Executive had ordered the redactions. Finally Gowdy was forced to admit that he was the wielder of the black felt pen while claiming earnestly that he and his Republican colleagues knew better than the CIA what needed to be redacted – the safety of a CIA source depended on absolute secrecy!
Unfortunately, in his haste to get the redacted email out to the media for immediate publication, Gowdy had neglected to ink over the source’s name in the subject line...
Another recent calamity for Gowdy’s committee is a perfect example of Republican ineptitude and karma.
Like the four committees investigating Benghazi before his, Gowdy was anxious to attribute a "stand down" order to President Obama, Secretary Clinton or both. That particular evidence had been provided by a retired CIA operative who was adamant that the order had come from the White House during the Benghazi attack.
The operative and terrorism expert was was a member of Accuracy In Media (AIM), the right-wing media-watchdog group which happens to also run its own little group called “Citizens' Commission on Benghazi”. That Benghazi group is an even more blatant endeavor to attack the Obama administration and Clinton in particular so AIM was understandably thrilled that their CIA operative became a Fox consultant, providing him with a media platform from which he could inform the investigating committees of his expert evaluation while intimating that he had special inside knowledge.
In March of this year, Gowdy focused narrowly on this specific incident until email-ghazi distracted everyone. It was therefore a major blow to all his efforts in the first half of the year to discover that AIM’s CIA operative was facing multiple charges of fraud because Wayne Simmons’ purported 27-year career as a CIA operative never actually happened.
In a bizarre meshing of Simmons’ con man skills and AIM’s failure to check his background, every Congressional committee investigating Benghazi was taken in by a charlatan. Every one of the five House committees prior to Gowdy’s had spent an inordinate amount of time on this apparent "smoking gun" before dismissing it. Gowdy failed to see the obvious pattern and blundered into the same dead end.
Perhaps Elijah Cummings could have directed him away from that wild goose chase if Gowdy had conducted an honest and transparent investigation instead of hiding so much of it from the Democratic contingent. Gowdy’s foolish misjudgment rebounded on him again, resulting in yet another prat fall.
He can’t even share the ignominy of being duped with other Benghazi committee chairmen. They’ve long ago wound up their investigations, written their reports and declared the "stand down" order a false clue in much the same way Pan Am reported a financial loss as a negative profit. It fooled Gowdy.
So many cracks in that thin ice and Gowdy’s ungainly slitherin from one fissure to another gets him no closer to a firmer surface. He should aim for the safety of the shore but he’s caught in a snare of his own devising because it was he who cajoled Boehner into giving him this elite committee assignment.
Now thanks to his Majority Leader he has to deal with the one thing he’s been trying to avoid all along: public scrutiny, very close public scrutiny, via a suddenly attentive media. It’s happening at the worst possible time too, just when he’s floundering and falling over.
But far be it from Gowdy to be deterred from blaming someone other than himself! As Politico reports:
Gowdy believes the criticism has been demonstrably unfair — an attempt to “delegitimize” his panel and discredit his personal reputation ahead of Clinton’s high stakes testimony on Thursday.
“It’s not lost on me that the uptick in criticism is [happening] the two weeks before she’s coming,” he says. “I don’t think that that is a coincidence; it’s an attempt to marginalize and impugn the credibility of the panel that’s going to be asking her questions.”
Gowdy hasn’t explained how Hillary Clinton and the Democrats at large have managed to create all this mayhem he’s been experiencing.
As Salon’s Simon Maloy remarked:
Gowdy’s implication that the “uptick” in attacks on the committee’s credibility ahead of Hillary Clinton’s testimony are part of a Democratic smear campaign might carry more weight if the flashpoint for all this criticism hadn’t been provided by the Republican House majority leader.
Maloy notes that Gowdy’s worst enemies have been the members of own party. In a television interview at the weekend, Gowdy did acknowledge this and his exasperation with them certainly showed when he demanded that they "shut up" about his committee. While his Republican colleagues have helpfully contributed to undermining his credibility, he’s failing to take into account that it’s actually Gowdy who is Gowdy’s biggest problem.